Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Zapatero or the anti-American single-mindedness

Spaniards are known to give a lot of relevance to symbols. Therefore, the picture of Jose L. Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain’s picturesque prime minister, conspicuously seated while everybody stands to salute the American flag is very significant. That was during the National Day military parade last year in Madrid. He was there invited, in the VIP space, in his quality of chief of the opposition. He wanted to make sure that everybody could see what he thinks and feels about America, a matter of fishing a few votes. Not very pretty, but understandable. But now, one year and 195 Spanish commuters murdered by al Qaeda later, he is the prime minister…

Since 9/11 2001, a detachment of the US Marines had been invited to march with their Spanish colleagues at the Oct. 12th parade. Now, this time Zapatero was the prime minister, so It had been a little too freaky to indulge in his little leftist act of remaining seated in front of it. So he just didn’t invite the US marines and send invitation to a French Foreign Legion detail instead. Mr. Zapateros intellectual capability being what it is, the idea’s father, without doubt, was the (oh so special) minister of Foreign Affairs, Miguel Angel Moratinos, another professional US basher and a personal friend of Yassir Arafat, that renowned pillar of democracy in the Middle East.

MM. Zapatero and Moratinos are now angry at US ambassador Georges Argyros. He didn’t attend the parade, thus loosing the memorable occasion of señor Zapatero not remaining seated in front of the star-spangled because of the star-spangled not being around to remain seated in front of it… Most indelicate, Ambassador Argyros spoiled the fun of whatever anti-American signal they had in store to humiliate him and his country. An infuriated Mr. Moratinos phoned Colin Powell (who didn’t have anything better to do than talking to him about that) to tell him about how offended everybody felt in Madrid…

Being anti-American can be popular among the left-of-the-center European constituency. I can also understand that Mr. Zapatero wants to be as popular as possible with that sort of people. If we don’t care much about ethics, we could even find a some sort of cynical rationale for his public stance towards America: America is wrong root and branch. For him, every American action, both present and past, is an act of deliberate oppression and exploitation. America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity. To be against America is to be on the right side of history; to be for it is to be on the wrong side (I borrow the phrase from Lee Harris seminal article on anti-Americanism).

Now, from the point of view of a balanced judgment of his performance as a (supposedly) mainstream politician in a democratic country, those rabid attitudes of his are more difficult to understand, let alone to make sense of.

Some very discerning friend writes to me from Madrid that Zapatero is perhaps the least cultivated political leader in Europe in many years and certainly the least intelligent. I won’t argue whether he is the kind to hide a sugar cube in a bucket of water or not, but I think that he is a fantasist day-dreamer and definitely quite ignorant regarding foreign relations.

My hunch is that this man lives in his own dream and can assemble only the most shaky relationship to the real world around him. But, then, he is perpetually insisting that his world is the real one, and in that process, he reduces the real world around him, and the people in it, to a theater for the enactment of his own private fantasies.

And well, had Zapatero been born in Latin America he probably would have been a Hugo Chavez of sorts… Since Spain is in Europe, he can’t really give free rein to his creative instinct and needs the advice of a cohort of dubious characters that still keep him in the belief that a tacit undeclared peace with the terrorists (be they Basque or Islamic) is a sensible alternative: he has just to negotiate with them and seek the friendship of say, Arafat, Fidel Castro and the Syrian regime, pay a salary to every Islamic self-appointed preacher in Spain and rely on an inexistent axis Paris-Berlin in Europe. The crucial question is to remain as anti-American as possible.

Meanwhile, in the real world, life goes on. In Paris everybody talks about the progress in the not so discrete negotiations of Nicolas Sarkozy with Colin Powell in order to repair the relations between Paris and Washington asap. French jurists debate what it would take to grant some ad-hoc immunity to President Chirac so that he could step down (his ailing health, bien sûr) without having to face the judges regarding his use of some public moneys and a few perks like ludicrously low-rent lavish apartments in the center of Paris for some of his family members and that sort of peccadilloes.

Sarkozy stands a very good chance to be the next president of France and he happens to be pro-American and said to have a very moderate enthusiasm about Mr. Zapatero political perspicacity.

And now, for the next post I have a tantalizing gossip about how Paris just sabotaged Mr. Zapatero’s stupendous plan to negotiate a truce with the Basque terrorist group ETA.

[Zapatero] A man who can only charitably be called a clown has replaced Aznar as head of government. A clown who came to power in the confused hours immediately following the horrid March 11 bombing of Madrid commuter trains by Islamic terrorists. A clown who rallied his supporters and tricked anxious voters with promises of putting an end to such terror by pulling out of the "coalition of the willing" that had liberated Iraq, withdrawing Spanish troops, engaging in some of the most strident anti-American rhetoric heard from a chief of government in Europe, and groveling to the French in the name of EU solidarity. His September 21 speech to the UNGA (excerpted above) was an unintended comedy classic (English translation; Spanish original) of breath-taking stupidity and vapidity....

Well, I do agree.

Woops! I almost forgot!

Let me quote again from Diplomad. They tell it so well...
The response of the Islamists to having their posteriors kissed [by señor Zapatero]? In sum, they undertook a wide-ranging plot to blow up Spain's high court, destroy court records, and kill as many judges as possible with a truck bomb containing between 500 - 1000 kgs (1100 - 2200 lbs) of explosives in order to "administer Spain the worst blow it has ever suffered." In other words, 200 dead commuters in Madrid were not enough. It appears the plotters were in contact with criminal elements as well as fellow Islamofascists in Europe, America, and Australia and possibly the Basque terrorist organization ETA (Basque Fatherland and Freedom) which has killed hundreds of Spaniards over the past 35 years.

So it would appear that the Madrid bombing was not really about Spain's role in Iraq or its friendship with the United States. No, not at all. Spain's "crimes" were and are that it is not Islamic and that in 1492 the Christians expelled the last of the Moors from Iberia. In other words, Spain and Spaniards must convert or die.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

The French Hostages & The Syrian Connection

A dramatic development has taken place in the murky affair of the two French journalists kidnapped in Iraq 45 days ago. François Bayrou, president of the UDF party (center-right), who met French Prime minister Raffarin yesterday, said that the Prime minister acknowledged to political party leaders that his government "did not rule out the possibility of the presence of the two French hostages in Syria."

While confusion continues to grow regarding the location of the hostages, it seems that the French now believes they could be in the hands of some Syrian service. What nobody says publicly is whether they were originally kidnapped by the Syrians or if these just “bought” them from their captors, who could belong to one of the dozens mafia-like groups that kidnap foreigners to re-sell them to al-Quaeda.
According to sources quoted in the French newspapers, the Syrians would have wanted to avenge France’s voting at the United Nations in favor of the US sponsored 1557 resolution, calling for Syria to end its occupation of Lebanon. The good news is that the hostages could be now closer to being set free, since France could use the very traditional diplomatic channels between states to put some pressure on Damascus. The bad news is that, in all cases, if the Syrian connection is proved, France will have to reconsider all its policy in the Middle East, based on appeasement, siding with Arafat in the Israelo-Palestinian conflict, and refusing to acknowledge the very existence of “rogue states”. An even more ominous scenario would be that the captors, to prevent exposure, decided to assassinate the hostages.

According to some versions, president Chirac was informed of the Syrian connection by his friend, the Lebanese primer minister Rafik Hariri. Another pressure to counter the 1557 UN resolution would have been the car bomb last week (Oct. 2nd) in Beirut that nearly killed former Minister Marwan Hamade, one of France’s closest allies in the region, precisely while Hariri and Chirac were meeting at the Elysée Palace in Paris.

Syrians angry over claims

Via Arabic NewsDamascus rejects to be involved in the French hostages caseIraq-Regional, Local, 10/7/2004

Damascus yesterday refused remarks loomed by French sources on the possibility that the two French hostages in Iraq and their Syrian drivers are with it and the attempt to link the matter with UN Security Council resolution 1559 as well as the allegations that it used the mediation made by the French parliamentarian Dedieh Julia.

Sunday, October 03, 2004

Birth of a Communicator

For John Kerry, his first debate with President Bush on 9/30 was to be, had to be, the launching pad towards victory. It wasn’t. Most people seem to agree that he “won” the debate, but Bush emerged from his “defeat” considered by the majority of the people who saw the debate to be more believable, more likable and tough enough for the job.

The democratic challenger can now say, like Pyrrhus after the battle of Asculum, "One more such victory and I am lost". Look at this summary table of the Gallup survey of registered voters who watched the debate:

Then you may well say that Americans saw Kerry as more articulate and well-spoken than Bush but they didn’t believe his message, nor did they think that fluency in English and the capacity of delivering sentences with more than two verbs are to be a president’s most important competences.

All in all, 53% of the sample said that Kerry did the better job in the debate and 17% of the republicans agree with that. Only 37% thought Bush did. Of them, only 8% of the democrats. I think that 8% of democrats are the most enlightened portion of the American people. Please, do count me in that groovy lot. I think that George W. Bush won the debate, if by winning we mean that he got closer to re-election; symmetrically, I believe Kerry lost because he didn’t get any closer to victory on November 2, far from it.

Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan have published “All The President's Spin”, a book that defends a notion which can be far-out to the Bush-bashing crowd in Europe and the adulators of dear Michael Moore. They mean that Bush is anything but the stupid, brutish red-neckish simpleton they love to depict; instead, they claim, [Let me quote one of my favorite European bloggers, Bjørn Stærk] (Bush) is the first president to apply principles from public relations to the White House on this scale. It's not just about having good hair and a warm smile any more.

And yet Bush is not just playing the same game as the other side - he's better and more deliberate at it than any previous president. He's a skilled, full-time manipulator. And the media lets get him away with it.

Wait a minute. That can't be true. The American media is left-of-center, it's biased against conservatives, not for them. Right? Well, yes. This can be discussed, but I largely agree that it is. From what I can see from across the Atlantic, there is a consistent left-of-center bias in the American media.

Bjørn seems pretty convinced that the authors of “All The President's Spin” got many things right about George W. Bush and so am I after this fateful debate.

But then the US media, and specially the Dan Rathers of this world, are too influenced by the hierarchy of values of pre-Internet society, they are communicating to readers, viewers and listeners who don’t exist any longer. The ones who would have voted into the White House a candidate just because he expresses himself more clearly than his opponent or has a more stylish haircut. And that’s the American media, because George W. is even more difficult to decrypt for their European colleagues; they are still at the stage of believing that a Texan moron can become the president of a country with 300 M people in it, which happens to have 18 out of the best universities in the world, is the only superpower left and invented the Internet. Poor little things. Some Texans are very sophisticated and some Europeans just think they are.

George Bush behaved in that debate as a master perception manager. He let Kerry develop his arguments to the last available tenth of a second in his beautiful New England English. Bush didn’t even seem to have memorized what he had to say. In just about right thick Texas vernacular, he kept saying that Kerry was a flip-flop and that George W. Bush was the best man to do the job of presiding the United States of America. He let Kerry do the talking and he did the communicating.

If you want some historic data to put what I say into context, here you have a beautiful one:

On Sep. 28 1984, there was a debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. 54% of the viewers said that Mondale carried the day. 35% thought that Reagan had won.

I had just put this post online when someone flashed me an angry email telling me several ugly things about my sanity. Since the sender is a friend (who didn’t want to embarrass me by posting a comment) , I feel obliged to address one of the things he says, at least to prove that I’m not more unhinged than the average. He says that Kerry made many grave accusations about Bush’s careless decisions regarding Iraq and the War on terror. Well, without entering into the matter of whether the accusations are warranted or not (that’s irrelevant in this context), I believe that they were largely ineffectual in terms of changing people’s perception of George W. Bush. The data from Gallup confirms that. Why?

First of all. After Michael Moore took Bush bashing deep into the red zone of overkill, nothing you (or Kerry) could say against him was really new nor really impressing. Every single attack against Bush during the debate was an old recuperated arrow, some sorts of de-cafeinated version of some prior assault, that people had already heard in a much more aggressive if not insulting form. All and everyone of the attacks that Kerry delivered rang bells, they were familiar, old, stale, worn-out. People who believed them before the debate continued to do so after and the other way around.

I mean, when one has seen Fahrenheit 9/11 or read any of the 81 books calling Bush anything from Hitler to the Anti-Christ, Kerry just sounded lame, flimsy. That wasn’t made better by the fact that the challenger tried to make them more palatable his attacks with a little ironic smile that exuded superiority, if you see what I mean.

Sunday October 03, 2004--The latest Rasmussen Reports Presidential Tracking Poll shows President George W. Bush with 49% of the vote and Senator John Kerry with 45%.

These results are based upon a survey of 3,000 Likely Voters conducted Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday afternoon. As a result, just over two-thirds of the interviews were conducted following Thursday night's Presidential Debate.

Interviews conducted on Friday and Saturday show Kerry with a one-point bounce so far since the debate. However, in post-debate interviews, Bush still leads 49% to 46%.

A very good post by Stygius refutes my analysis with some very interesting arguments.
Read it here

Now, I think it belongs among the very best traditional analysis I have read. But I have a couple of arguments that I think will put the whole question back into perspective... Working on it.

Friday, October 01, 2004

Predictable Candidates? Perception Managers? Back to the Future

Now, journalists often complain (particularly when having more than their fair share of booze) that their wives/husbands don’t understand them, their editors should sell shoes, and those *#*k!%6 politicians are just too #@k!%6 predictable, so what’s the point with loosing your time asking them questions if you know exactly what they’re going to answer.

Well, that may be so in many cases. Politicians were never portents of candor, but things are going from bad to worse with the irresistible rise of PR experts, image authorities and communication gurus.

Right now it is 5 pm ET in the States. In 4 hours (that’s 3 AM over here!), John Kerry and George W. Bush will be “debating” for the world to see and Americans to decide who’s the man that will call the White House home for the next four years. And some journalists are so weary that they have written things like the futuristic article below (Thanks Molotov) that is ricocheting around the Net.

Just let’s see tomorrow if there are many a divergence between this and what the NYT, WT, LAT etc. say…Here it is.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. Sept. 30, 2004 — After a deluge of campaign speeches and hostile television ads, President Bush and challenger John Kerry got their chance to face each other directly Thursday night before an audience of tens of millions of voters in a high-stakes debate about terrorism, the Iraq war and the bloody aftermath.

The 90-minute encounter was particularly crucial for Kerry, trailing slightly in the polls and struggling for momentum less than five weeks before the election. The Democratic candidate faced the challenge of presenting himself as a credible commander in chief after a torrent of Republican criticism that he was prone to changing his positions.

Bush was expected to confront questions about leading the nation into war on the still-unproven premise that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He also has faced accusations that he lacked a strategy to deal with the violence and chaos that have left more than 1,000 Americans dead and that the Iraq war has diverted U.S. attention from al-Qaida and other terrorists.

With a record of four years in office to defend, Bush had a debate strategy of being optimistic about Iraq but acknowledging that times were tough. His stance is that Americans know he is a decisive leader even if they don't always agree with his decisions and that Kerry has taken conflicting positions on Iraq and can't be trusted to lead the nation.

Although Kerry voted to give Bush authority to invade Iraq, he says he would not have followed Bush's path to war a path that alienated allies and, the Democrat says, left Americans less secure. Kerry argues Bush is out of touch with reality, paints too rosy a picture about Iraq and lacks a strategy to end the crisis. Kerry also says Bush has neglected other major problems like North Korea and Iran, two nations suspected of pursing nuclear weapons.

Kerry, in a taped interview on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Thursday, said, "George Bush is scaring America. He's talking terror every day, and people see terrible images of what's happening in the world, and they're real."

Bush spent the morning comforting hurricane victims on his fifth survey of Florida areas hit by storms. At the Martin County, Fla., Red Cross center, Bush thanked volunteers for showing "the true heart of America. We long to help somebody when they're hurting."

The debate's focus on Iraq was sharpened by bombings in Baghdad Thursday that killed three dozen children.

Ahead in the polls, Bush could afford to settle for a debate draw while Kerry needed something to break the status quo. Some Democrats saw the debates as the last chance for a Kerry breakout.

Thursday night's meeting at the University of Miami was the first of three Bush-Kerry debates over a two-week period. Neither side was underestimating its importance with a TV audience of 30 million to 40 million expected. Almost a third of people surveyed say the debates will be a deciding factor in how they vote.

The first debate drew the nation's attention to hurricane-battered Florida and its political importance. Florida swung the presidency to Bush in the disputed 2000 election and could determine whether he wins re-election

The debates were staged under a rigid set of rules negotiated by the candidates' representatives to limit spontaneity and opportunities for back-and-forth exchanges.

Political Correctness WatchJohn Ray, a former university teacher gone blogger monitors political
correctness around the globe. When you needthat cheering information that somewhere else
it's even worse than in your home town...

About Me

I have been a journalist since I was 22. For a (long) while I worked as a reporter for the Swedish, Spanish (I was born in Spain) and American media, covering international affairs...
After 1991 I recycled myself to the business press.